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artificial intelligence

In 1945 Turing predicted that computers would one day play very good chess, and just over 50 years later, in 1997, Deep Blue, a chess computer built by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), beat the reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov, in a six-game match. While Turing’s prediction came true, his expectation that chess programming would contribute to the understanding of how...

“Chessmaster”

popular series of electronic games for playing chess against a computer; it was originally released in 1986 by the Software Toolworks, which was acquired by the Learning Company.
Chessmaster featured extremely competitive artificial intelligence engines—with later versions named “the King”—that challenged all but the most skilled of players and helped bring the...

development

Computers began to compete against humans in the late 1960s. In February 1967 MacHack VI, a program written by Richard Greenblatt, an MIT undergraduate, drew one game and lost four in a U.S. Chess Federation tournament. Its results improved markedly, from a performance equivalent to a USCF rating of 1243 to reach 1640 by April 1967, about the average for a USCF member. The first American...

supercomputer application

...a world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a “slow” game. It was then assigned to predict the weather in Atlanta, Ga., during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Its successor (now with 256 custom chess processors) defeated Kasparov in a six-game return match in May 1997.